long forms we recognize today; rather, Wolf contended that Homer composed short ballads thatwere easier tomemorize andwhichwere compiledlong afterHomer’sdeath. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars attempted the much-debated process of analyzing the Iliad and the Odyssey to reveal the demarcations of the original ballads. Because no one could agreewhere individual poems began and ended, every scholar’s divisionswere different and the subject ofmuch disagreement.
Assuming that Homer was indeed illiterate, German scholar F.A. Wolf averred that the poet did not leave behind the Iliad and the Odyssey in the
they knew it metrically into a line and could use while improvising a poemin front of a live audience.
Perhaps most notably, the 20th century American scholar Milman Parry demonstrated that the Iliad’s use of a set of recurring epithets wasmost likely part of a system for oral storytellers who improvised within a set
meter.According to Parry, the epithets provided the poetswith phrases that
In An Iliad, creators Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare are interested in the idea of a “collective Homer.”
“I liked the idea that Homer was probably not one person in history. I think ‘Homer’ is what we call everybody who did this job. I liked the idea that to become Homer, you simply had to have the desire, the ability tomemorize and the talent to tell the story—and youwere Homer. I started thinking of it as a coat that you could wear, that anyone could put the coat on and they were Homer. It’s not just that theywere reciting it. They were Homer.” – Lisa Peterson, irst rehearsal at NYTW
It’s All Greek toMe: Translating Homer
Translators—particularly translators of poetry—do not simply translate the exactmeaning of each and every word. Rather, they must attempt to maintain the voice of the original poet: the rhythm, rhyme scheme, plays on words, alliteration, etc. In some cases, certain words in the source language may not have equivalents in the target
language.Translatorsmust also take into account any difference in cultural practice or idiomwhichmay cause signiicant confusion for readers; in otherwords, the best translator is bicultural aswell as bilingual.
Robert Fagles,whose translation of the Iliadwas the basis of Peterson andO’Hare’s An Iliad, prefaces his work by explaining the balancing act of translating Homer’s epic poem:
Obviously at a far remove fromHomer, in this translation I have tried to ind amiddle ground (and not a noman’s land, if I can help it) between the features of [Homer’s] performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-for-line translation,my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer’s language as to cramp and distortmy own—though Iwant to convey asmuch ofwhat he says as possible—nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drive—though Iwantmywork to be literate,with any luck. For themore literal approachwould seemto be too little English, and themore literary approach seems too little Greek. I have tried to ind a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.
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